It’s week 5 already! This week, the school had organized various industry visits, which comprised mainly of local Chinese companies. While there were several options on which companies to visit, the ones I visited were Liangzhu Dream Town, Zhejiang Kaiyao Lighting Company and Wahaha Industrial Park.
Liangzhu Dream Town
From what I understood, Liagnzhu Dream Town is China’s first industrial design town, intended to promote an innovation oriented development in the country. We were given a tour of the compound and they showed us many cool and innovative designs created by the local companies from various industries.
Wahaha Industrial Park
Wahaha Industries is a local Chinese beverage producing company, with many of its drinks very popular amongst the locals here. We visited one of Wahaha’s factories in Hangzhou and got to see the automated process of drinks being bottled and packaged. We also got to sample the drinks. I found the their yogurt drinks to be especially interesting as they are quite different from the yogurt drinks I have tried before.
Interesting fact: Wahaha is the 5th largest beverage producing company in the world but it is a private company where 26% of its shares are owned by employees.
Interestingly enough, it was not tour of the factories itself that was most time-consuming in these industry visits. Rather is was the actually the cumulative travel time to and fro school. (Imagine how large China is!)
